The moment I learned how to do my own manicure, I never looked back. I may not paint my nails that often, but aside from doing one shade of nail color, I also attempt to do some nail art. Some designs I have yet to learn (and yes, I still have to buy a special brush to do some designs), but for now let me share this very easy nail art.


The inspiration for this came from this video, which I got to see last month:


A very easy nail art to do... all you need is your manicure set and some strips of newspaper.

If your Internet connection isn't fast and you don't want to watch the video, here are the steps I made:

1. Clean the nails. Just do however you want it - some people prefer cutting their cuticles, I don't.
   
2. Apply base coat to protect your nails.
3. Apply white nail polish. For this, I used Caronia's White Rose (frosted) nail polish. Depending on your nail polish brand, you may need to apply two or three coats. Sometimes, one coat is enough. It's really up to you, go with your own preference. Allow your nails to dry completely.
   
4. Dip your finger in some rubbing alcohol and while the nail is still wet, place a strip of newspaper on your nails. Press hard (for about 10 seconds) so that the ink from the paper will be transferred on your nails. Peel off the paper. Do the same until you finished decorating all of your nails.
5. Apply a top coat so that the prints will be protected.

A very simple nail art, but you can surely create a whole lot of variations for it, like...

• Instead of using white nail polish as your base color, you can also use different pastel shades of nail polish.
• If you have very long nails, you can go for the French-style manicure - just paint the top part of the nails with color and decorate it with the newspaper print.
• To make it a little artsy, you can also use newspaper with different alphabets (like Chinese, Russian, Japanese or Korean), if it's available, of course.

To save some rubbing alcohol, you can also cut strips of newspaper and dip it in alcohol before pressing it on your nail. The key for this to work is to make sure the newspaper is really wet, because if it isn't, parts of the paper will be left on your nails.

For my nails, I started by cutting the paper strips. I really tried to look for prints with words that I want to show on my nails. As you can see, I chose the word "love" for one of my nails; other words I used include: pretty, intense, rose, truth, help, grace, magical, and flow. Only eight words... because my pinkie is so small to actually spell out a whole word.

As easy as this can be, I still want to share some tips: Press the paper real good and don't allow that strip to slip even just a bit because it might leave a bad print. Also, be careful on applying the top coat - the brush can smudge the prints (like what happened on my pinkie) and it didn't look good at all.

My nails didn't look good, but at least now I know a different way to present my nails. :)